The ‘deficit model’ is the idea that if the public understood
scientific concepts they would accept the judgements of scientists.
Or, if scientists shout loud enough eventually people will agree with
them. Or, people don’t like GMOs/fracking/climate change science
because they are dumb.

This is a hot-topic in the aftermath of the US Presidential Election
and theUK’s EU Referendum, when ‘experts’ were widely ignored
and her contribution has been well received.

My reaction to Brigitte’s tweet was Spinoza of course, but
there was no reference of the seventeenth century Dutch philosopher
in her piece.

My interest is as part of my remit as the RCUK Academic Fellow for
Financial Mathematics between 2006 and 2011 was the ‘publicunderstanding of Financial Mathematics’, or at least the ‘public
engagement with Financial Mathematics’. This introduced me to the
issue of the ‘deficit model’ over a period in time dominated by
the ‘Great Financial Crisis, which started 10 years ago yesterday.

For almost ten years I have been trying to figure out what is the
relationship between finance, mathematics and ethics. To me, a
significant contributor to the GFC was the belief that ‘science’
had some how tamed financial risk. Therefore to understand the GFC
it was necessary to understand where the faith in scientific
determinism originated, and I think the source (in European science
at any rate) is in Spinoza. The argument is presented in the book I
am finishing off for Palgrave

and I have extracted two relevant sections, separated by some 27,000
words and 125 years.

Baruch Spinoza would produce the most influential development of
Descartes’ philosophy that incorporated ideas from de Groot and
Hobbes during the ‘Dutch Golden Age’. Spinoza’s family were
Portuguese Jews, marranos, who had been forcibly converted to
Christianity in the sixteenth century. They had immigrated to the
United Provinces in 1593, taking advantage of Calvinist toleration
and Baruch’s father became a prominent, and wealthy, citizen of
Amsterdam. Baruch was born in 1632, his first language was
Portuguese and he grew up studying in Spanish and Hebrew and he only
studied Latin in his twenties. His understanding of Greek philosophy
came primarily through Judaic and Islamic interpretations, rather
than from the Scholastics.

Spinoza became involved with the Collegiants, a sect that had emerged
as a successor to the Arminians, and was eventually excommunicated by
his synagogue in 1656, changing his name to Benedictus. The
excommunication did not worry Spinoza too much and he developed a
reputation as a teacher, writer and a lens-grinder, a skilled
profession closely associated with the important new science of
optics. Supported, in part, by a pension from de Witt, he developed
his philosophy and in 1670 moved to The Hague where he would witness
de Witt’s murder in 1672. He died in 1677, probably of
tuberculosis.

Spinoza’s most influential work, his Ethics, was published
posthumously in 1677. Spinoza echoed Plato, Augustine and Descartes
in arguing that mathematics provided the means of discerning truthi
and the text presented a deductive chain that proved propositions
having started with definitions and axioms. The key step that
Spinoza took in developing Descartes’ work was to collapse the
three types of substance: matter, mind and God, into one. This was
captured in his phrase Deus sive natura, ‘God or nature’,
indicating that there is only a single substance2
that, when viewed from one perspective is nature but from another is
God. This solved the problem of how Descartes’ mind interacted
with matter at the cost of prohibiting contingency3
because if everything was connected to God, it could not happen by
chance. This also meant that emotions were not part of the mind, and
so could not be rationalised, but were governed by the laws of
nature4,
as Hobbes had implied.

Spinoza argued that people believed themselves to possess free-will
and had autonomy because they did not see the complete picture, being
only finite5.
Spinoza believed that the purpose of the individual was to lift
themselves out of a mundane perspective in order to comprehend the
totality of creation, coming to understand the true nature of God’s
will: the laws of nature. The ethical nature of the Ethics
was in describing how different actions helped, or hindered, the
individual in approaching God6,
which would give the correct perspective on everyday phenomena.
Spinoza believed that at the most basic level people had direct
knowledge of nature through their senses. This could be improved
into a scientific knowledge of the world that identified connections
between phenomena and so was able to make generalisations. The
ultimate aim was to have direct knowledge of the generalisations7,
not mediated by ‘finite’ ideas or concepts and this knowledge
delivered true freedom8.

Spinoza’s contribution to western philosophy was in suggesting that
humans were capable of attaining a complete picture of the universe
that provided certain knowledge. This was novel to Europeans rooted
in the Scholastic tradition that synthesised Aristotle and Augustine.
However, it was reminiscent of Jewish and Islamic mysticism. Jewish
mysticism ‒ Kabbalah ‒
had become prominent in the thirteenth century through Moshe ben
Naiman Girondi, from Catalonia, while Sufi thought was legitimised in
the eleventh century by the Islamic scholar Muhammad ibn Muhammad al
Ghazali. Both these scholars challenged Hellenistic philosophy, with
al-Ghazali’s repudiation of Aristotle in The Incoherence of the
Philosophers being pivotal in the development of Islamic thought.
Associated with al-Ghazali was the doctrine of occasionalism, that
effect follows cause not because of a physical law but only because
God’s will. Spinoza echoed this attitude when he argued that a law
of nature was simply a consequence of God’s ‒
or nature’s ‒
consistency9.
In Sufi metaphysics there is the concept of ‘Unity of Essence’
(wahdat al-wujud, وحدةالوجود)
and the idea that people seek ‘annihilation in God’ (fanaa,فناء, ‎‎)10
just as for Spinoza people sought a God-like perspective. While
Islam and Spinoza both denied contingency, they did not deny the
ability of the individual to assert their own will, it was just that
asserting one’s will against God ‒
or nature ‒ would be
detrimental to the individual11.
This idea of determinism was unusual in European thinking. The
Calvinists believed in predestination, that the ultimate fate of a
person’s soul was destined for heaven or hell, but an individual
had will throughout their life. Spinoza’s argument was that
individuals don’t really have a choice in correct action; knowledge
guides them to the correct course12.
If someone makes an immoral choice, it is through ignorance13.
This is less bestial than Hobbes but still rejects autonomy.

If Judaism can be characterised by the covenant with God and
Christianity by God’s caritas for people, in Islam people
can be characterised by having an intellect that can discern God’s
will14.
In this sense Spinoza was introducing Islamic, specifically Sufi,
ideas into western philosophy. This was possible because Spinoza was
re-presenting tested Islamic philosophy that opposed Aristotle, just
as European thought was rejecting Aristotelian ideas.

The influence of Spinoza on western thought becomes significant at
the end of the Enlightenment. Romanticism had appeared in English
literature in the 1790s. It incorporated Rousseau’s idealisation
of the ‘noble savage’, in a ‘state of nature’, and
empiricism, which focused on the individual sensation of nature. In
Germany, the movement was broader and more significant with a
philosophical basis, idealism, in a problem Kant created in trying to
resolve the issue of mind-body dualism. Idealism addressed the
problems by dissolving the distinction between observers and
observed, an approach that was heavily influenced by Spinoza15.
A core concept in idealism was the principle that what was observed
was dependent on the thinking ‘I’ that, itself, could only exist
in the context of society. This spawned the idea that national
identity was fundamental to the individual, fusing Spinoza, Rousseau
and Kant.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, born in 1749, exemplified the broader
Romantic Movement. His fame was established with his 1774
sentimental novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows
of Young Werther). Today Goethe is known for his interpretation of
the Faust story, written in 1808, that describes how Mephistopheles
suggests that a ruler solved their financial problems by printing
paper money, backed by gold reserves, which were yet to be
discovered16.
In 1775 had been invited to become a civil servant for the small
Duchy of Weimar where he would remain a bureaucrat until his death in
1832. Goethe was responsible for some mines and became interested in
geology and the natural sciences generally. As a novelist, Goethe
was interested in the ‘narrative’ of science rather than brute,
individual facts, an approach that coincided with the idealists’
approach to science, Naturphilosophie.

Naturphilosophie was personified by the Prussian naturalist
Alexander von Humboldt. Humboldt travelled to South America between
1799 and 1804 and gathered observations of nature that he then
presented in Ansichten der Natur (Aspects on nature) in 1807.
Humboldt aimed at Spinoza’s all-encompassing perspective that
transformed an apparently capricious nature into a cohesive whole17.
However, this implied that science was fundamentally subjective,
with the scientist being part of, not an objective observer of,
nature18.
To ensure that the ideas coming out of the mind of a scientist,
often presented as a solitary genius, were true representations of
the world, their observations had to be precise and accurate. Johann
Carl Friedrich Gauss, the director of the Göttingen
observatory from 1807, addressed the fidelity of scientific
observations by developing the Central Limit Theorem into a theory of
measurement and the Normal distribution, which is often referred to
as the Gaussian distribution.

The Romantics regarded nature as a complex, ‘living’ organism and
were concerned with how nature changed, rather than focusing on how
it was at any single point in time19.
This represented a ‘counter-revolution’ in science, reverting to
Aristotelian qualities rather than Cartesian quantities. Some
Romantics, notably William Blake, were highly critical of the
mechanistic natural philosophy founded on Descartes and Newton20
and stressed the need for human imagination in theory construction.
With respect to Malthus, the Romantics saw his argument as reducing
people to elements of a machine and they preferred more paternalistic
policies, associated with the Tories.

Prussia had initially joined the attacks on Revolutionary France in
1792 but became neutral in 1795, content to see the Holy Roman
Empire, ruled by the Austrian Hapsburgs, disintegrate. However, in
1806, as Napoleon presented a greater threat, Prussia declared war on
the Empire and was swiftly defeated. In the aftermath of the defeat
the Prussian’s began a programme of reorganising the state
administration, inspired by Kantian ideals, whereby subjects would
become citizens21.
During this time, Georg W.F. Hegel developed idealism by arguing
that the nation was a living organism, with a purpose, will and
rationality22.
This contrasted with the dominant view of the eighteenth century
that saw the state as a machine designed to deliver ‘interests’,
a view that Hegel rejected for the same reasons that the Romantics
rejected mechanistic science. Hegel argued that the state’s will
was defined by ‘public opinion’ which expressed

the genuine needs and correct tendencies of common life, but also, in
the form of common sense, of the eternal, substantive principles of
justice23.

Hegel argued that the state and people were indistinguishable,
because an individual was formed in the context of culture, and so
their aims are necessarily compatible. In addition, he rejected the
idea that public opinion developed through discourse could be
meaningful, since it would only represent the subjective opinions of
a narrow section of the public24.
Therefore, like Rousseau, Hegel believed the well-constituted state
could not be challenged and the role of education was to ensure
people’s subjective opinions conformed to the state’s, Spinozian,
objectivity. This perspective can be contrasted with that of Thomas
Paine, who had argued at the start of Common Sense, an essay
of 1776 and a key inspiration of the American Revolution, that

Some
writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave
little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only
different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our
wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our
happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively
by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other
creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.25

I suspect students of Spinoza and Hegel will object to my caricature, but I think the essential point that " Spinoza’s contribution to western philosophy was in suggesting that
humans were capable of attaining a complete picture of the universe
that provided certain knowledge." is important in understanding why 'science' believes in the 'deficit model'.

1
(Spinoza 2002, 240)

2
(Spinoza 2002, I.P14, 224)

3
(Spinoza 2002, I.P26, 232)

4
(Spinoza 2002, 277-278)

5
(Spinoza 2002, 238-241)

6
(Spinoza 2002, IV.P28, 334)

7
(Spinoza 2002, V.P25, 375)

8
(Spinoza 2002, 378-379)

9
(Spinoza 2002, 239)

10
(Davis 1984, 12)

11
Qu’ran 4:79, (Spinoza 2002, 359-362)

12
(Spinoza 2002, V.P42, 382)

13
(Spinoza 2002, IV.P27,334)

14
(Schuon 1976, 19-22)

15
(Frank 2003, 55-76), (Förster and Melamed 2012),

16
(Wennerlind 2003, 234), (Binswanger 1994)

17
(Daston 2010)

18
(Fara 2009, 215-218)

19
(Brush 1976, 655)

20
(Christensen 1982)

21
(Clark 2006, 327-344)

22
(Hegel 1952, Secs. 257-258), (Clark 2006, 451)

23
(Hegel 1952, Sec. 317), (Habermas 1991, 120)

24
(Habermas 1991, 119)

25
(Paine 1998, 5)

Brush,
S. G. 1976. The
Kind of motion we call heat: A history of the kinetic theory of
gases in the 19th century.
North-Holland.